There’s just no way around it. Like it or not, football is fundamentally different from the three other major sports, which can be played entertainingly while tamping down the danger and violence inherent to competitions in which unreasonably athletic humans are trying to outperform each other. Even hockey, which I’d argue has become in many ways more violent than football, can rely purely on its speed and sex appeal for an All-Star game.

With football, the collisions, the impact, the abrasiveness — short of these dudes playing two-hand touch, there just isn’t a way around them. To try and mitigate their chances of injury, the players can’t just focus on other aspects of the game, because the offensive lineman still need to push the defensive dudes and the defensive dudes still need to hit people. Instead, the players just slow down. AND IT’S TERRIBLE.

Seriously, watching the Pro Bowl is like sitting in on an SAT class. I’d rather grind coffee for three hours. The only reason it should exist is because people adore the moronic and delightful experience of arbitrarily anointing heroes from a batch of heroes. Oh, Matt Stafford didn’t make the Pro Bowl last year! What a loser!

And fun fact, you don’t need to make these guys slog through the motions of a fake game when all that really matters is the fact that they were named to it in the first place. Consider what Peyton Manning or Calvin Johnson or Darrelle Revis has to prove during the Pro Bowl. I hope you didn’t consider that for very long, because the answer is nothing. Kill the damn game, and just make “Pro Bowl week” coincide with pre-Super Bowl festivities, since the guys are all there anyway. Hell, they can have a Madden tournament or something if you really want some ACTION. You can bet they’d care way more about the outcome.

3. I dare you to watch these highlights from last year’s game for more than 45 seconds without eating your laptop.